The Laughing Corpse (31 page)

The dry sunken earth cracked open over Gaynor's ancestor's grave. A pale hand shot skyward. A second hand came through the crack. The zombie tore the dry earth. I heard other old graves breaking in the still, summer night. It broke its way out of his grave, just like Gaynor had wanted.

Gaynor sat in his wheelchair on the crest of the hill. He was surrounded by the dead. Dozens of zombies in various stages of decay crowded close to him. But I hadn't given the order yet. They wouldn't hurt him unless I told them to.

“Ask him where the treasure is,” Gaynor shouted.

I stared at him and every zombie turned with my eyes and stared at him, too. He didn't understand. Gaynor was like a lot of people with money. They mistake money for power. It isn't the same thing at all.

“Kill the man Harold Gaynor.” I said it loud enough to carry on the still air.

“I'll give you a million dollars for having raised him. Whether I find the treasure or not,” Gaynor said.

“I don't want your money, Gaynor,” I said.

The zombies were moving in on every side, slow, hands extended, like every horror movie you've ever seen. Sometimes Hollywood is accurate, whatta ya know.

“Two million, three million!” His voice was breaking with fear. He'd
had a better seat for Dominga's death than I had. He knew what was coming. “Four million!”

“Not enough,” I said.

“How much?” he shouted. “Name your price!” I couldn't see him now. The zombies hid him from view.

“No money, Gaynor, just you dead, that's enough.”

He started screaming, wordlessly. I felt the hands begin to rip at him. Teeth to tear.

Wanda grabbed my legs. “Don't, don't hurt him. Please!”

I just stared at her. I was remembering Benjamin Reynolds's blood-coated teddy bear, the tiny hand with that stupid plastic ring on it, the blood-soaked bedroom, the baby blanket. “He deserves to die,” I said. My voice sounded separate from me, distant and echoing. It didn't sound like me at all.

“You can't just murder him,” Wanda said.

“Watch me,” I said.

She tried to climb my body, but her legs betrayed her and she fell in a heap at my feet, sobbing.

I didn't understand how Wanda could beg for his life after what he had done to her. Love, I suppose. In the end she really did love him. And that, perhaps, was the saddest thing of all.

When Gaynor died, I knew it. When pieces of him stained almost every hand and mouth of the dead, they stopped. They turned to me, waiting for new orders. The power was still buoying me up. I wasn't tired. Was there enough to lay them all to rest? I hoped so.

“Go back, all of you, go back to your graves. Rest in the quiet earth. Go back, go back.”

They stirred like a wind had blown through them, then one by one they went back to their graves. They lay down on the hard dry earth and the graves just swallowed them whole. It was like magic quicksand. The earth shuddered underfoot like a sleeper moving to a more comfortable position.

Some of the corpses had been as old as Gaynor's ancestor, which meant that I didn't need a human death to raise one three-hundred-year-old corpse. Bert was going to be pleased. Human deaths seemed
to be cumulative. Two human deaths and I had emptied a cemetery. It wasn't possible. But I'd done it anyway. Whatta ya know?

False dawn passed like milk on the eastern sky. The wind died with the light. Wanda knelt in the bloody grass, crying. I knelt beside her.

She jerked back at my touch. I guess I couldn't blame her, but it bothered me anyway.

“We have to get out of here. You need a doctor,” I said.

She stared up at me. “What are you?”

Today for the first time I didn't know how to answer that question. Human didn't seem to cover it. “I'm an animator,” I said finally.

She just kept staring at me. I wouldn't have believed me either. But she let me help her up. I guess that was something.

But she kept looking at me out of the edge of her eyes. Wanda considered me one of the monsters. She may have been right.

Wanda gasped, eyes wide.

I turned, too slowly. Was it the monster?

Jean-Claude stepped out of the shadows.

I didn't breathe for a moment. It was so unexpected.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Your power called to me,
ma petite
. No dead in the city could fail to feel your power tonight. And I am the city, so I came to investigate.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I saw you kill the men. I saw you raise the graveyard.”

“Did it ever occur to you to help me?”

“You did not need any help.” He smiled, barely visible in the moonlight. “Besides, would it not have been tempting to rend me to pieces, as well?”

“You can't possibly be afraid of me,” I said.

He spread his hands wide.

“You're afraid of your human servant? Little ol'
moi
?”

“Not afraid,
ma petite
, but cautious.”

He was afraid of me. It almost made some of this shit worthwhile.

I carried Wanda down the hill. She wouldn't let Jean-Claude touch her. A choice of monsters.

D
OMINGA
S
ALVADOR MISSED
her court date. Fancy that. Dolph had searched for me that night, after he discovered that Dominga had made bail. He had found my apartment empty. My answers about where I had gone didn't satisfy him, but he let it go. What else could he do?

They found Gaynor's wheelchair, but no trace of him. It's one of those mysteries to tell around campfires. The empty, blood-coated wheelchair in the middle of the cemetery. They did find body parts in the caretaker's house: animal and human. Only Dominga's power had held the thing together. When she died, it died. Thank goodness. Theory was that the monster got Gaynor. Where the monster came from no one seemed to know. I was called in to explain the body parts, that's how the police knew they'd once been attached.

Irving wanted to know what I really knew about Gaynor's vanishing act. I just smiled and played inscrutable. Irving didn't believe me, but all he had were suspicions. Suspicions aren't a news story.

Wanda is waiting tables downtown. Jean-Claude offered her a job at The Laughing Corpse. She declined, not politely. She'd saved quite a bit of money from her “business.” I don't know if she'll make it or not, but with Gaynor gone, she seems free to try. She was a junkie whose drug of choice was dead. It was better than rehab.

By Catherine's wedding the bullet wound was just a bandage on my
arm. The bruises on my face and neck had turned that sickly shade of greenish-yellow. It clashed with the pink dress. I gave Catherine the option of me not being in the wedding. The wedding coordinator was all for that, but Catherine wouldn't hear of it. The wedding coordinator applied makeup to the bruises and saved the day.

I have a picture of me standing in that awful dress with Catherine's arm around me. We're both smiling. Friendship is strange stuff.

Jean-Claude sent me a dozen white roses in the hospital. The card read, “Come to the ballet with me. Not as my servant, but as my guest.”

I didn't go to the ballet. I had enough problems without dating the Master of the City.

I had performed human sacrifice, and it had felt good. The rush of power was like the memory of painful sex. Part of you wanted to do it again. Maybe Dominga Salvador was right. Maybe power talks to everyone, even me.

I am an animator. I am the Executioner. But now I know I'm something else. The one thing my Grandmother Flores feared most. I am a necromancer. The dead are my specialty.

I
T WAS THE
second summer in a row that St. Louis had suffered weeks of one hundred-plus temperatures, with a hundred percent humidity. As the heat closed around us like some gigantic sweaty fist, I began thinking of murder. It was my second summer of plotting murder. Maybe it was the heat, or maybe I'm just not right. The family who raised me would probably agree with the latter, but that means nothing; most of us are strangers to our birth families. The real telling point is that my friends would agree, but they like me anyway, or sometimes even
because
I'm not quite right. Because they aren't quite right either. To the handful of normal, well-adjusted friends that I have, my apologies. To the rest of you, argue if you can.

Once upon a time, it bothered me that I don't think like the majority of people. That I walk through a world where the worst can happen, and often does. That I see danger where most people see nothing. I am told that I think like a cop. I'd ignore that, except that it's policemen who told me. I'm told by people in the military that I think like a soldier. Though both the police and the military add that I'd make a good detective but a lousy uniform; a good officer, but a bad enlisted. I'm just not good at taking other people's orders. Sorry, but I'm not.

The book you're holding in your hands was a paperback original almost ten years ago. The fact that it is coming out in hardback is a testament to how devoted the fans of this series have become, and how two stubborn petite women managed to change the publishing industry, almost by accident.

This particular petite woman found hard-boiled detective fiction the summer after college. The male detectives got to cuss, have sex, and kill people. The women, even the most liberated of them, didn't cuss much, if there was sex it was sanitized or off stage, and if they killed someone they had to feel very, very bad about it. This seemed unfair to me, so I decided to write a character who would even the playing field. Enter Anita Blake, the other stubborn petite woman. I might have gotten a little carried away with the whole idea that Anita needed to be tougher, rougher, and just
more
, than the men. To my knowledge, she has the highest kill count in literature outside of war novels. She cusses like a sailor, and the sex is hot enough that many fans claim as couples they read my books to each other as foreplay.

My original plan was actually to never have to do sex on paper. I wanted every touch, every caress, to be so amazing that I didn't have to resort to writing actual intercourse. But six books into the series, we did the dirty deed on paper, and because I'd spent five books building up to it, I couldn't skimp on the scene. Or felt I couldn't. Besides, I'd written books where every crime, every bit of necessary violence was kept on full camera, no flinching. So that when it came to sex, and I wanted the camera to do that 1940s pan to the sky; I couldn't do it. What did it say about me as a person that I hadn't paled at showing murder and mayhem in every book, but the first real sex scene had me panicked. Actually, it just proved that I think like an American. Violence is dandy, but God forbid you show sex on stage. Let alone enjoyable sex between two people that know and like, and maybe love, each other.

I didn't plan to be the spokesperson for women's sexuality. Really, I didn't. But I had too many people in the publishing industry tell me that my books were disturbing, not because of the violence and sex, but because a woman wrote the sex and violence. And even worse my main character, a first person point of view, was female. I had one well-known mystery editor tell me that the Anita books would never have sold as straight mystery. This was when, I think, only three books were out, so we hadn't even crossed the sexual divide. No, her objection was to the level of violence. A straight mystery heroine was not allowed to be that violent. If I'd been a man, and, or, my main character had been male,
then it would have been okay. I really thought that we'd come further than that in this country. Guess I was wrong.

Anita and I are very different people, but one trait we do share. If you tell us we can't, then we are more determined than ever. Stubborn. Contrary, my grandmother would say. So be it. What everyone kept telling us was that the sex had gone far enough. Had my editor told me to slow down, tone it down? No, she hadn't. It was other people, at other publishing houses, and it was other writers, mostly male, who told me I'd gone too far. Then I started hearing from other countries. Americans think that we're backwards when it comes to sex, and the Europeans are having lots more sex, and kinkier sex. It's true that the European fans are more bothered by the violence and hardly at all by the sex, but if they were bothered, it was again about the fact that I was a woman and so was Anita. I began to hear from women in this country and in others, that they had been raised to believe that women didn't enjoy sex. That womens' appetites were less than mens'.

Who starts these stories?

The truth is that some women do not enjoy sex. Some women do not have the sexual appetite of a man. The truth is that some men don't enjoy sex. That some men don't have as large a sexual appetite as some women.

I think this idea that men are sexually predatory and we women are just victims, gets both men and women in trouble. If a man isn't that interested in sex, he's considered less of a man. If a woman is more interested in sex, she's a slut. Both of these are false assumptions.

People say I'm a feminist, but in truth, I am an equalist. I believe that everyone, male and female, should be free to be whom and what they are. Not to fit into some tight cultural box. The best quick example I have in this country is the double-standard for strippers. A male stripper has a female customer tear off his G-string, and the police arrest him, not her. A female stripper has a male customer tear off her G-string, and the customer is thrown out of the club and arrested. The idea is that men should be okay with sexual contact, because they like it, and women don't like it, so they should be protected from it. That is unfair, and untrue. Assault is assault, no matter who's stripping whose dignity.

By the way, who decided that men don't want doors in the bathrooms? I know a lot of men who'd like a little privacy, if they could get it.

Now all this talk about sex may be misleading, since there is no sex in
The Laughing Corpse
. But there is something in this book that also was new and different when I started out. Mixing genres.

It took more than two and a half years to sell the first Anita Blake novel,
Guilty Pleasures
, because nobody knew what to do with it. The mystery houses thought it was horror. The horror houses thought it wasn't scary enough, and called it fantasy or science fiction. The science fiction houses called it fantasy. The fantasy houses called it horror. Etc. . . .

I was literally told that mixed genre fiction does not sell. Period, end of story. Since the last five books I wrote have all been
New York Times
bestsellers, and all of them have mixed genres, I'm glad I didn't listen to the doomsayers.

I combine mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and science fiction, usually all in one book. Why pick one genre when you can play in all of them?

Thanks to my success the publishing industry has actually begun to solicit mixed genre books, especially urban fantasy mixed genre. I have heard back from editors and agents that people are actually asking writers to send them something “Hamiltonesque.” I feel a little young to be an “esque”, but once I got over the weirdness factor, it was sort of flattering.

None of the imitators, so far, have done nearly as well. Why? I'm writing exactly what I want to write. I think a lot of the imitators are writing this because they think it will sell. I think if your heart isn't in a book, especially a series, it shows. Most people who are just reading me to try to figure out what I do that has captured so much attention, see the sex and violence and monsters. They think, oh, I'll put in some vampires, some sex, some violence, and it'll sell. Not exactly.

If you asked me what I wrote I wouldn't say I write vampire novels. I certainly wouldn't say that I write erotica or horror. If pushed, I'd say fantasy because it has the broadest definition. I don't sit down to a book
and think this one will be more of a mystery, or more of a romance. I sit down to a book, and let my characters come talk to me.

I don't write books about vampires. I write books about people who happen to be vampires. Everybody must be a person first and whatever else second. Anita raises zombies for a living and is a legal vampire executioner, but first she is Anita Blake who lost her mother when she was eight and has never forgiven her father for remarrying. The fact that some of my characters are vampires shapes their character, profoundly, but I think of them first as characters, not first as vampires. Anyone who reads this, and doesn't understand the distinction, I'm not sure I can explain it to you. Anita has been shaped by her job, by her preternatural abilities with the dead. Shaped and broken and changed by what she has seen and experienced. But first, she was a little girl, and somewhere under all the violence and sex, she is still that little girl, crying for her mother. Jean-Claude is an immortal vampire, the Master Vampire of the City. He is the demon-lover, the dark prince that you both want and fear, but he is also still the peasant boy that was taken from his family, at a very tender age, because the wife of the nobleman who owned their land thought he was beautiful and would be a fit companion for the noble's son. Somewhere under all that suave charm is still the confusion he must have felt from being taken out of a world of poverty to a world of opulence.

Having written that last sentence, I realize, that I didn't know Jean-Claude's back-story when I wrote
The Laughing Corpse
. He was just a cute dead guy to me back then. I was still yelling loud and long that I would never use him as a romantic lead. I'd kill him first. In fact, he was supposed to die at the end of the third book,
Circus of the Damned
. But when the time came, I couldn't do it. Because, by then, Anita would have missed him, and so would I. I began the series believing, as Anita did, that the monsters are monstrous, and people are somehow better just because they aren't vampires. It would take us several books to realize that the world was not black and white, but oh, so gray. Anita's journey as a character was part of my own journey as I struggled to understand what I was writing and why. I write first so I can read it. So I can enjoy the books. I write what I want to read. Lucky for me, lots of other people want to read it, too.

But I am also writing to make sense of my world. So different from Anita's, but her world helps me think about ours more clearly. It may take me years after I've written something to understand why I wrote a particular book. Then one day it will dawn on me, and I'll think, oh, that was why. It's like having therapy in public, and getting paid for it.

It's May, almost summer, and I'm sitting down to the computer, and thinking of murder. And sex. And love. And what exactly loyalty means, and who do you owe it to? And the age old question, what is love, and how do you know when you've got the real thing? Oh, and one other question: whodunit? Truthfully, even I don't know yet. But I can hardly wait to find out.